Live x264 capture comparison

The x264 encoder is now of such a high quality that it is possible to compress live tv on the fly with good results. So far transcode is the only solution that delivers on all counts: good audio/video synchronization, small file size, efficient encoding (full size and high quality without dropped frames), and a resulting file that streams with VLC. These results, however, may vary locally; the following is a status report from late March 2006 on a Debian amd64 sid with Marillat's multimedia packages and a dual-core or dual amd64 CPU.

A change was made to the x264 repository on 1 August 2006 that allows the switch --threads=auto to detect the number of CPUs.

General

File size is in theory a simple function of audio and video bitrates. In practice, ffmpeg and mencoder produce files according to bitrate settings, while transcode is all over the map -- in a small sample of ten, an hour at "-w 500" ranged from a small 377MB all the way up to 684MB, and "-w 800" from 407MB to 754MB. Quality may also vary; currently not assessed.